Editorial
Front Page - Friday, June 4, 2010
Red Cross director relishes opportunity to serve
David Laprad
Barbara Alexander is the executive director of the Chattanooga Red Cross. She took the job in 2006 after spending most of her career in child protective services.
- David Laprad
Barbara Alexander, executive director of the Chattanooga Red Cross, is in a position to help a lot of people should disaster strike locally.
Whether it’s a house fire that puts a family of limited means on the street or severe weather that places an entire community at risk, she’s part of an organization that tends to the immediate needs of the victims of tragedies.
While Alexander’s job satisfies a deep-seated desire within her to assist others, in a way, the reactive nature of the Red Cross is a departure from the driving force in her career: to be able to prevent problems rather than deal with them after they occur.
A native of Chattanooga, Alexander graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a degree in psychology and took a job at Kirkman Technical High School (located where Creative Discovery Museum now stands) as a counselor. A few years later, she went to work in child protective services for the State of Tennessee.
“I started out at the end of the system, where people had already been to court and ordered to have someone visit their home every week,” she says. “It was depressing because what I did took place after the abuse and neglect.”
Later, Alexander began handling court cases in which the state had already removed the children from their homes. At that stage, a judge would decide whether or not the state should have removed the kids and, if so, devise a plan to send them back. This put Alexander earlier in the process, where she was able to work with families to remedy their situation.
Alexander left that job to be with her son full-time for the first few years of his life, then in 1992 moved to Florida to work in child protective investigations. Her work took her even closer to the front end of the process.
“When you work in child investigations, you get the call when it first comes in and go talk with the family,” she says. “That was tough but fascinating work. I kept thinking how much better it would be if we could help people before their neighbor called because of the screaming. That’s where I wanted to be.”
Alexander had climbed the ladder to supervisor when a friend told her about a nonprofit child visitation center with an opening.
“I hated tearing families up. And as I talked with people from nonprofits, I began to see that they give you room to develop ideas and be creative. That was what I’d been looking for all along,” she says.
The next thing Alexander knew, she was running a small nonprofit in Jacksonville that supervised court-ordered visits between children the state had removed from their homes and their parents. While she was still dealing with the consequences of a bad situation, she says, she loved working at the center, as it felt like being able to take a deep breath after being constrained for so long.
Alexander loved her next job, too: running a nonprofit child abuse prevention service.
“If there was a family that had been identified as having the potential for abuse or neglect of a child but the conditions weren’t serious enough to remove him from the home, we’d go in, develop a plan, do parent education, help the family put together a budget and so on,” she says.
“The idea was to keep families together and stop things from deteriorating to the point where there was abuse or neglect and the child had to be removed.”
Alexander became interested in the Red Cross as she watched the organization’s relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. So when the opportunity to assume leadership of the Red Cross in her hometown cropped up in 2006, she seized it.
As executive director, Alexander supervises a dozen employees and 400 registered volunteers, oversees the chapter’s budget, keeps an eye on the programs the Red Cross manages, helps to raise funds and fills in wherever else she’s needed.
While much of the work the Red Cross does involves reacting to crises, Alexander’s job also feeds the part of her that longs to keep bad things from happening. From CPR and first aid courses, to emergency preparation materials available online, to blood drives and beyond, the Red Cross does more than respond to disasters, it arms people with the tools they need to save lives and prevent worst case scenarios.
Alexander says the most challenging part of her job is raising money. While the United Way covers 30 percent of her chapter’s $1.1 million annual operating budget, donations must cover the rest.
“When you see the Red Cross go out, it’s going out on donated money,” she says.
Although Alexander has been impressed with the amount of donations coming out of Chattanooga (local contributions to the flood relief effort in Nashville totaled over a half million dollars), she says it’s important for people to remember that gifts to the “Red Cross” go to the national office. If an individual wants to give money to the local chapter, he needs to write “Chattanooga” somewhere on the check.
Work wasn’t the only thing that drew Alexander back to Chattanooga. She also wanted to return to where her family and friends lived and where the mountains provided a diversion from the rigors of daily life. In that respect, her move has turned out to be a good one.
Alexander’s choice is working out well for Chattanooga as well. No city can have too many people concerned about the quality of the lives of its residents, lending a helping hand in times of distress and looking ahead to what tomorrow might bring and taking the measures to ensure no matter what happens, its people will be ready.
Learn more about the Chattanooga Red Cross at www.chattanoogaredcross.org.
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